Wednesday, February 19, 2014

The Monuments Men and the importance of art

My first reaction to The
Monuments Men was how sad it is when art about the importance of art largely
fails to communicate the importance of art. That’s what I tweeted right after I
saw it, but I’d like to unpack that complaint a little more.

The Monuments Men spends
a lot of time telling its viewers that art is important. George Clooney’s
character assures the people around him (multiple times) that art is what the
Allies are really defending against the Nazis. Art, he claims, is the memories of
a civilization. An entire generation can be wiped out, but the culture will
endure as long as its artifacts do.

His character arc is to discover just how much he thinks this is true. As his team lands in Europe he cautions them to be
careful, saying that no piece of art is worth their lives. By the end of the
film, he’s changed his mind about that. In a hammy scene, he debriefs FDR who
pointedly asks if the mission was worth the loss of life. Clooney’s character
proudly declares that yes it was. He’s clearly taken a journey in the film. The
trouble is that I didn’t get to take it with him.

The film doesn’t offer a compelling reason to care about the
pieces that the team is trying to save. For all the talking about why art
matters, the movie largely fails to show it in a way that makes an emotional
impact. It tries a couple of times though, and it’s enlightening to take a look
at those and see what they’re saying. Even if they don’t entirely succeed to
support the stated message of the film, on their own they make some thoughtful
points about the value of art.

There’s a moment that’s in the trailer when Matt Damon looks
around at a room full of paintings and asks Cate Blanchett what all that stuff
is. “People’s lives,” she says. In addition to the movie’s awesome cast, that’s
the line that got me into the theater. Art is important to the extent that it
reflects people’s lives. It’s why we sometimes call it culture. There’s a sense
in which art documents the culture – the society; the thoughts and values – of
the people who made it. That’s what the movie is trying to say, but for the
most part it says it so academically that it’s tough to connect to that idea
emotionally. Blanchett’s line helps correct that, but it’s not enough. And it’s
undermined by other moments in the movie.

For instance, there’s another scene in which Matt Damon
discovers the address where a painting came from and takes it back. Maybe it’s
a famous painting, but I didn’t recognize it. More likely – and I actually,
deeply hope this is the case – it’s just a portrait of a loved one. He takes it
to the abandoned house from which the Nazis stole it and sees the discoloration
on the wall where it once hung. As he puts it back, Blanchett comes into the
room and says that the people who used to live there probably won’t be coming
back. I forget Damon’s exact response, but he basically questions whether or
not that matters. Which – in a nutshell – is the problem with the entire movie.

It’s a story about returning art to its proper place (though
the definition of proper place is never debated and that could be a fascinating
discussion all by itself). But The Monuments
Men isn’t all that interested in why this
is an important task. For Damon’s character, it’s just about the activity of
returning art to the physical location from which it came. Blanchett suggests
that it’s about returning it to the people for whom it has meaning. That can be a museum or other cultural center,
but the appreciation of a museum patron for a piece is a crucially different
thing than the meaning it holds for someone who’s intimately connected to it.
The movie is interested enough in that difference to acknowledge it exists, but
not enough to spend any time on it for the art that the team is actually tracking
down and risking their lives for.

One final scene will help clarify what I’m talking about. It’s
Christmastime and Bill Murray’s character gets a phonograph record from home.
He doesn’t say what it is at first, just that he wants to hear it, and my first
thought was that it was a new recording by a favorite musician. When he listens
to it though, it’s revealed to be a recording of his family sending him
greetings and then someone (His daughter maybe? The movie probably says, but I
missed it.) sings “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas.”

It’s a sweet moment and Murray reveals a lot of longing for
home in that scene. But it’s made even more powerful by the juxtaposition of my
expectation for the record and what it actually was. I thought it was just
going to be a piece of art that he liked the way you like a painting in a
museum or a carving in a church. Instead, it was art – specifically, a song –
that he was deeply connected to because of the singer and the time of year.
George Clooney could have made an entire movie about trying to rescue that
record and I would have been more invested in it than I was in the salvation of
the classically “important” pieces that are the focus of The Monuments Men.

It needn’t have been that way. Instead of just telling me
that the Ghent Altarpiece is hugely important and needs to be saved, the film
could have shown me how important it was to a character I cared about. It tries
to do this with Michelangelo's Madonna of Bruges, but again, it tells me that this character likes that
piece without ever convincing me why. And that's the overriding, fatal flaw of the rest of the film, too.

3 comments:

Damon's response to Cate Blanchett was that he was hired to return stolen art and that's what he's going to do. This was as good a place to start as any.

I just saw this movie this past weekend. I loved the movie more than I expected to.

I see what you're saying, but it clearly didn't bother me as much as it did you. First of all, they were rescuing hundreds of thousands of art pieces and we can't be convinced of the importance of every single piece. Besides, what connected me to the movie wasn't the art, but the team itself. Seeing their connection to the cause, to each other and their overcoming of obstacles was, to me, the heart of the movie. They could have been rescuing old wooden hope chests and it wouldn't matter because I was invested in the team itself. The whole team felt sincere in its purpose and that is what made me feel for the movie.

Plus, I don't really need to be convinced that the Ghent altarpiece was important. These guys convincingly believed it was, so I believed it as well. I bet if we read the book, we'd learn more about that piece's history. As well as Rembrandt's Portrait of a Young Man which the team searched for and is seen briefly in the movie but is still missing to this day (as I found out during research afterwards).

You're right on about the characters. The actors are so good that they made me care about what happened to the team and I love how they pair off and go on side missions. I agree that there's a lot to like about the movie.

I think though that if it had been simply a fun heist movie, I would've enjoyed it a lot more. It was all the speeches about the importance of the mission that distracted me from simply enjoying the mission itself.

Like, if in Oceans 11 they had spent half the movie trying to convince me what a bad guy Andy Garcia is. That movie didn't hit me over the head trying to get me to accept that Garcia deserved ripping off. It just showed me that in some quick, but powerful ways and then got on with the caper. I wish Monuments Men was more like that.

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About Me

Michael May writes Kill All Monsters, a comic that he and artist Jason Copland created. He also co-hosts a few podcasts including Dragonfly Ripple (about nerd parenting), Mystery Movie Night (a movie review podcast that's also a game), Hellbent for Letterbox (about Westerns in cinema, TV, books, and comics), and Starmageddon (Star Trek and Star Wars).